Quick Start Guide?

[NancyJ]

I've been thinking about trying Ruby on Rails for some time now but every time I look at it, it just seems so complicated and difficult to get started with. I'm a long time PHP user and I have zero experience with ruby with or without rails. I know the RoR people claim you'll develop 10x faster with rails but I cant even get started.
Is there a comprehensive quick start guide somewhere that will take you all the way from installing ruby, rails & pref an ide on windows to developing your first functional project (ie. not Hello World) Also covering topics such as security and session handling since all the RoR projects I've seen in the demos can (and have been) editted by anyone. The RoR wiki has been completely trashed by spammers.

[ess]

I have started learning Ruby on Rails about 4 months ago...and found that learning the basics of the Ruby programming language essential in understanding some constructs such as Hashes, Arrays etc. and how they are implemented in Ruby.

Although the following tutorial is very basic...I think it is quite a nice introduction to programming Ruby.
http://www.ruby-lang.org/en/documentation/quickstart/

Also, I found this tutorial quite useful in understanding advanced concepts of Ruby...
http://www.rubycentral.com/book/

As for a tutorial that demonstrates how to install Ruby on Rails and create a very simple application, I find the following tutorial to be very useful and introduces the concept of Model View Controller.
http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/onlamp/2.../20/rails.html

As for a text editor, I have been using JEdit....as I personally program in Java, JavaScript, PHP, etc and found a useful tutorial on how to customize JEdit for Rails.
http://www.eadz.co.nz/blog/article/r...ils-jedit.html

If you are interested in getting a video tutorial for Ruby on Rails. I recommend the following from Lynda. It covers all aspects of programming in Rails, including security, authentications, etc.
http://movielibrary.lynda.com/html/modPage.asp?ID=324

Cheers,
Ess

[Aradon]

I've just started learning Ruby on Rails and I wanted to add for those that are more familier with the Eclipse IDE there is a rather nice plugin for Ruby on Rails called RDT


RDT Link

(Sorry for the necro thread, was going through looking for a post like this and thought I'd contribute while also using some of ess' links)

[rafiki]

also found this interesting site.
http://tryruby.hobix.com/

[Aradon]

Originally Posted by rafiki

also found this interesting site.
http://tryruby.hobix.com/

Wow, great find there. Probably the best interactive tutorial I've seen in a while.

[rafiki]

hehe thanks, shame i didnt find out that this thread was way old before i read it and replied, still its a good share..

[feram71]

Originally Posted by rafiki

also found this interesting site.
http://tryruby.hobix.com/

That's a great tutorial. Also look at those sites:

Creating a weblog in 15 minutes:
http://rubyonrails.org/screencasts

http://rubylearning.com/satishtalim/tutorial.html

[Infect]

Sorry for the gravedig, mods feel free to delete but I think it's a pretty good addition to the still-stickied thread. A list of phenomenal sites that introduce you to Ruby itself:
http://tryruby.org -- basic introduction to ruby fundamentals
Ruby Bits Pt. 1
http://www.codeschool.com/courses/ruby-bits-part-2Ruby Bits Pt. 2
All these are run by Code School and are completely worked in your browser with an interpreter.

And some excellent Rails guides:
http://www.codeschool.com/courses/rails-best-practices
http://www.codeschool.com/courses/ra...ng-for-zombies
http://www.codeschool.com/courses/ra...-zombies-redux
http://www.codeschool.com/courses/rails-for-zombies-2
Those 4 are run by Code School as well, and all coding is done entirely in an interpreter in the browser.
And I think this is probably the best guide out there for everything there is to basic Rails, it covers installation of Ruby, Gems, Git, and Rails from scratch, bundling and the MVC architecture, quickly rolling out a simple app with scaffolding, setting your app up to scale with Heroku, and a complete tutorial on how to write an app from scratch. This guide is a legitimate book that's available for sale, but you can also read it online for free on the official Rails website: http://ruby.railstutorial.org/ruby-o...-tutorial-book

Hope these help everyone, again sorry for the gravedig but trying to help out a seemingly dying forum.